Interlude - Index of

44 | Beginnings
The question of when Mike should step down went way
back. We had looked for a CEO when we first started the company.
Despite his earlier experience as a CEO, Mike was reluctant
to “get back in the saddle,” as he put it. He explained that
the founding CEO of a start-up has the shortest employment
life expectancy in Silicon Valley, and he said that the job came
with two rules:
Rule Number One: Never keep more in your office than you
can fit in a gym bag.
Rule Number Two: Always keep a gym bag in your office.
Initially he took the role on a short-term basis. He would
be CEO for just a month or two until we got our first VC
round. They’d help us find a CEO so that Mike could focus
full-time on technology and strategy, more of a chief technology
officer (CTO) role. Instead it took us a year and a half to
raise VC money, and once Mike became CEO, he was reluctant
to give it up. Whenever we raised the issue, he would
argue that we shouldn’t switch until . . . we shipped product,
got more funding, became profitable, went public—always
some goal at least six to twelve months in the future.
In our first eighteen months, we raised $1.5 million from
twenty-four angel investors, often in $50,000 to $100,000
chunks. That was hard work, and Mike spent much of his time
out of the office looking for money. Mike was most effective as
a leader when he wasn’t around too much and when the whole
company could fit around a small table. We had disagreements,
but we could work through them as a group. It was a
relatively egalitarian environment. Mike was the first among